Mapped Supplier - Purchase Orders

Continuing the discussion from Custom Trading Style - Customise Invoice:

So I just created some purchase orders in the second account (after linking it to the primary as a supplier) and was expecting to see them in the primary account. This doesn’t appear to happen. Is it only invoices that are pushed through between linked supplier accounts?

Also, would it be possible to add other email addresses to the list that is used when linking accounts? I use unique email addresses for most things so the email address I use with QF is used nowhere else, and the address used on my invoices and quotes is used nowhere else so none of my customers would ever find me on QF, and I have also had the same issue with a couple of customers on QF who have done the same. Just a list of aliases somewhere would be handy that would be used as identifiers only when people are linking accounts to you.

Yes, sales invoices get pushed through as purchase invoices on the linked accounts. I’m afraid it doesn’t work in reverse.

Regarding your second point is this just purely for discoverability? So when your client fills out the following box (on the supplier detail screen) your account will be revealed?

We’d need to think about preventing address spoofing. E.g. I could enter an alias that I don’t own to trick people into connecting. We’d need a whole system to validate alias addresses.

If there were demand I guess we could look at this further.

That is correct, yes.

Yes, I was thinking you would just(!) need to fire off a validation email for activation.

The only doubt I have is whether general users would understand what aliases are for? Maybe they’d assume they can do more than just aid discoverability for mapped accounts.

I’m always afraid of “feature creep” we add some control then it gradually gets pulled in different directions until we have some horrible Frankenstein feature that nobody can understand :worried:

Maybe it’s better just to have a company name lookup there too? Although that also raises some privacy questions.

I think that happens whatever you do in any line of work!

I know I’ve said that exact same thing before. It was just a thought as I was mapping suppliers, it’s an issue I have had a couple of times so I can’t be the first?

If you did have the company name lookup maybe that could be off by default to save the privacy issues?

Yes that’s what I was thinking, email search will still work, company name search needs to be manually enabled.

I think we’ll implement something like that for now… it’s logged in our feature planner.

EDIT:

Making company search optionally available also has it’s problems.

If only a small handful of users have this switched on (which is likely to be the case) the predictive search is going to look really bad. I.e. I type in the first letter and just a few results appear, those same result will flash up on almost every search.

Some more thought is needed on this one I think. Maybe even going down the route of the supplier initiating the invites?

I just think this is an under utilised feature that maybe needs some tweaking to make it more useful. I have dealt with several companies that use QuickFile but never knew until randomly mentioning it sometime. I think it could do with being made bi-directional for a few things, like quotes, purchase orders etc to get the full effect, might find more people use the mapped supplier/client feature then. If you make it so the supplier has to initiate the process you might find that is used less as you have less of a user base that can enable the feature.

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